


Write On Me

by chlexcer



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Emotional Constipation, F/F, F/M, Fem!Kai, Fem!Sehun, Fem!chanyeol, Flirting, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, Romance, Soulmates, fem!d.o., fem!suho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-22 16:25:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11971167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlexcer/pseuds/chlexcer
Summary: [Prompt #G40] If Kyungsoon had it her way, she’d like to meet her soulmate in person, first. She’d like for them to hit it off spontaneously, andthen, after all that, she would like to discover that they are meant to be. If the universe had made someone just for her, then it might as well finish the job and allow for a chance for them to meet each other, right?





	Write On Me

**Author's Note:**

> First of all!! I want to say thank you to the mods for their hard work and their patience! Also, to Alka, for having the patience to listen to me rant about this AU and try to put the pieces together. Next, I wanted to apologize to the person who prompted. I altered a few things (such as the POV of the character that narrates the story as well as the rating). The prompt asked for NC-17, but I was only able to deliver M this time around. However, I promise that I’m working on a continuation, and it will definitely be NC-17~ Thank you so much and I hope you like it!

Kyungsoon knew that it was bound to happen, someday.

She had grown up bombarded by novels, comics, tv shows, videogames, and movies regarding the topic, after all. And not only that, but her own mother had sat her down when she turned fifteen to explain to her that the day may come where she found words written or drawings doodled on her hands, bruises on her skin on places she didn’t remember hitting, or maybe even (“god forbid”, her mother emphasized before taking a deep breath) a _tattoo_.

She told Kyungsoon that it was normal, that it was the way it was supposed to be – she told her that all it meant was that there was somebody out there she shared a soul link with, a soulmate, and that the bond between them showed upon their skin. 

So, Kyungsoon knew that it was bound to happen, someday, somehow.

There was no exact recipe, though, and it worked differently for everybody. Some people didn’t get soulmates, some people got more than just one, and the age at which the visible effects of the soul link became perceptible also varied from individual to individual. For instance, her best friend, Kim Jungah, had found her soulmate, Lee Taemin, at the age of four at the birthday party of a kid from her kindergarten class. Taemin had gotten his face painted like Spider Man with makeup that wasn’t soulmate-proof, and in doing so, Jungah’s face turned into Spider Man’s as well. They’d been together ever since.

But Jungah’s and Taemin’s case was really, really extraordinary.

What was common was for middle school and high school boys and girls to go around with little messages written on their hands, smiley faces doodled on their skin like brand watermarks, with the hopes that the things they drew on their own skin showed up on their soulmate’s and they would find each other – nevermind the fact that most soulmate links only started to become visible when people approached their twenties, sometimes even later. Most people found their soulmates by the time they were in college, where the trend of doodling things onto one’s own skin, looking for one’s soulmate, and _trying to make things happen_ tended to disappear. By then, the soulmate marks were no longer considered decisive destiny forgers, but rather verifiers – just a sort of guarantee.

Kyungsoon supposed that something like that was going to happen to her, minus the doodling part. 

She had never been the type to rush into things or force things unnecessarily. She knew that if it was supposed to happen, then it would happen, so while she knew that, chances were, there was a person somewhere out there that was made _just for her_ , she never went out of her way, drawing embarrassing doodles (or even her own signature, like lots of people did) on her skin to mark them like they were cattle that belonged to her. If the universe had made someone just for her, then it might as well finish the job and allow for a chance for them to meet each other, right? That was her mindset, at least.

That is why, when it _did_ happen – when the marks started showing on her skin, it really, _really_ took her by surprise.

And it made her furious, too.

She was on her last year of high school when her soulmate link showed up on her skin for the first time, so she was still pretty young, all things considered. She had good grades, and if she managed to keep a good overall average and she did well enough on her CSATs, she was sure she’d be able to go into the career she wanted in a good university. 

That didn’t mean she didn’t struggle with some classes, though, because she did, especially with those related to math, or sciences.

“Did you study for the exam?” Jungah asked Kyungsoon casually as soon as she walked into the classroom. Her friend was sitting on the desk behind her own and had her feet propped up on her chair like she was some sort of rebel, but Kyungsoon knew her friend was anything but. She was the world’s biggest softie. Okay, sure, she was pretty tall and somewhat muscular, she didn’t care much about having her hair in perfect order, and she sometimes got in actual fights with her comb, but she also carried a copy of The Little Prince in her backpack at all times, she had been learning ballet from the moment she developed fine motor skills, and her ringtone for Taemin was SNSD’s _’Gee’_. Kyungsoon paid Jungah’s posture no mind as she sat down on her own desk between Jungah’s and Sehyun’s. The latter didn’t even look up at Kyungsoon, too busy running her eyes over and over again over her math exercises notebook (even though Kyungsoon knew she probably didn’t knew to review to do well). 

“I did what I could,” Kyungsoon replied, honestly, as she pulled out her pencil case and her glasses case from her backpack. “As long as I pass, I don’t care much. I hate math. I really hate math. I’m sure I won’t ever need to use algebraic formulas in the real world.”

“I read they teach us this shit to get us to develop our logical-mathematical reasoning, or something like that,” Jungah commented, turning her head to look at Kyungsoon with a thoughtful look on her face. “But I’ve always thought they could just make us do sudoku. Could you imagine solving sudoku to get into college? It’d be wild.”

“Did _you_ study?” Kyungsoon cut in, throwing a deadpan look at her friend. She arched a bushy eyebrow at her, too, and she wasn’t surprised when Jungah shrugged evasively.

“I did what I could?” She echoed Kyungsoon’s words, albeit not too convincingly.

“ _Jungah—_ ”, Kyungsoon started, nagging her friend like her mother would nag her, but then a surprised gasp from Sehyun interrupted her.

“Unnie, what’s _that_ …?” Sehyun asked, sounding nearly panicky as she touched Kyungsoon’s exposed forearm with her long fingers. Summer vacation was over, yes, but it was still very warm outside, so Kyungsoon had left her uniform sweater at home. Her arms were completely exposed since she was only wearing the school’s t-shirt, so when she looked at her left arm where Sehyun was touching, she sucked in a sharp breath.

“What the—!” she nearly cursed and her eyes flew open so wide that they might as well have popped out when she _saw_. Right there on the caramel skin of her forearm there were what seemed to mathematical formulas of some kind that Kyungsoon couldn’t understand at all. There were geometrical shapes, dotted lines, letters in Western _and_ Greek alphabet, and arrows, and the figures only kept on appearing out of nowhere, clearly following the pen of a person who knew what they were doing if the speed with which they wrote was anything to go by.

“Oh my god…!” Jungah exclaimed, nearly jumping from the desk she had been sitting on and grabbing Kyungsoon’s hand to examine the messy scrawls that were appearing on her skin. “Oh my god, Kyungsoon—!”

Kyungsoon’s heart flipped inside of her chest for some reason she could not understand, but at the same time, a surge of panic surged across her nervous system. She shook her head in denial, and she flapped her arm around to get Jungah and Sehyun to stop touching her before she curled her left hand onto a fist and put it against her chest.

“No way, no way, _no fucking way_ ,” she cursed, hiding her left forearm against her body. She turned to look at Sehyun with her eyes open wide. “Sehyun-ah! Give me your sweater, quick!”

“What? Unnie, wait…! Isn’t that your soulmate mark thing…?!” Sehyun asked, clearly amused at the sudden turn of events, but before she could even begin to undo the buttons of her sweater, the teacher walked into the classroom and the loud chatter that had reigned turned into near solemn silence. Kyungsoon swallowed thickly. If the teacher saw the markings on her skin, he’d definitely think she was cheating, which would mar her records forever and ever.

“Sehyun-ah, _please_ , your sweater…!” Kyungsoon asked under her breath as their math teacher went through the usual motions of explaining the methodology of the test. Jungah had forgone hers as well, so Sehyun was the only one who could’ve saved her. “If Choi-seonsaengnim sees this I’m _dead_ —!“

“—Miss Do and Miss Oh, at the back!” the teacher called, clearly disrupted even though Kyungsoon could’ve sworn she hadn’t been loud. She looked up at him, still pressing her forearm to her chest, eyes still as wide as saucers. “Separate, you two. Miss Do, take a seat on the free desk near the front; Miss Oh, you stay where you are. Everybody else, be quiet. Now, quick, or you’ll have less time to finish your test.”

Kyungsoon wanted to cry. She wanted the earth to swallow her up, or eject her and send her into outer space.

But she did as the teacher said.

She swallowed her embarrassment, she picked up her stuff, and went to sit at the available desk near the front, even if by doing so she caught sight of her arm again and her urge to cry grew exponentially. There was not an inch of skin between her wrist and the inside of her elbow that was devoid of complex mathematical formulas she could not understand.

The teacher started handing out the tests, and he was getting closer. Kyungsoon considered telling him what her situation was and explain it all to him, but the moment he deposited her test on top of her desk, her self-preservation instinct kicked her logical reasoning in the ass and she pressed her arm against her chest even more fully.

She thought she would be able to finish the test like that, but in the end, and despite her best efforts, she got caught.

Of course, pretty much everyone was used to seeing doodles and writings on the arms of high school students of either gender, but the marks on Kyungsoon’s skin were so far from being regular doodles, that Kyungsoon got sent to the discipline inspector’s office without being allowed to finish her test.

It was a nightmare.

Lucky for her, she had never _ever_ been sent to the inspector’s office before and she had a good reputation even among teachers, so she was able to explain, nevermind how embarrassing it was. She swore a thousand times that she wasn’t trying to cheat, that she didn’t have a clue what the writings on her forearm meant, and that whatever was written there wasn’t even being taught at their class to begin with.

Thankfully, she was allowed to take the test again, but she would have to go to detention once, just to appease Choi-seonsaengnim and the discipline inspector. After all, it was pretty unlikely that, all of a sudden, her soulmate markings appeared while she was taking a _math test_ , and that they happened to be _mathematical formulas_.

So, from that moment on, Kyungsoon decided that, whoever her soulmate was, they were the biggest idiot in the entire universe.

The worst part was that it kept on happening.

It didn’t happen on the daily, thankfully, but every now and then, the markings would appear again, and Kyungsoon would just stare at them, wondering what in the world she did wrong. The letters, numbers, and lines appeared messily but with a stroke that was clearly confident. She had no clue what anything her soulmate wrote onto her skin even meant, but she was even more clueless as to _why_ they were using their skin as canvas. Did they not know that their soulmate would be able to see it, too? Were they so self-centered that they didn’t consider their own soulmate could get in trouble by having her arms marked up? Did they not think their soulmate could, at the very least, get _annoyed_?

It was good that the weather started getting colder and colder as the semester advanced, because cold weather meant long sleeves, and long sleeves meant no weird math tattoos in sight.

“I think it’s cute, though,” Jungah said over lunch one day in October, trying to pull Kyungsoon’s sleeve up to see the markings that had started to appear on her skin during English class that morning. Kyungsoon rolled her eyes, but she let her friend get away with it and allowed her to roll her sweater sleeve up. “At least they’re not drawing dicks, or anything of the like. Seriously. It could be worse. Remember when Jonghyun-oppa allegedly drew a dick on Taemin’s arm and I went all day with a dick drawn on my own arm without realizing?”

“Allegedly?” Sehyun asked around a mouthful of rice, cocking her head and making her pretty blond hair sway with the movement. Sehyun was pretty. Really, very pretty. And very tall, too. Kyungsoon sometimes wondered how did she do it to become best friends with the tallest girls in the entire school when she herself was so short she could pass for a first-year student.

“Taemin says it was Jonghyun-oppa, but it was obviously him. He makes a little face when he lies, he really cannot lie,” Jungah replied, shrugging, and it made Sehyun snort.

“I think I would prefer that than going around with my arm looking like an Egyptian papyrus,” Kyungsoon sighed, glancing down at her arm. “It’s not cute. It’s annoying.”

“Why don’t you just erase the marks, then?” Sehyun asked her. “If it bothers you so much…”

“Because it looks so important! See? I’m trapped!” the oldest girl explained, “if it were just dicks, or silly messages, or whatever, then I’d just… Go and wash it off. But I don’t even understand what it means, and it’s really intimidating. What if my soulmate needs to take those notes?”

“Then they should invest in a notebook,” Sehyun commented, shrugging.

“Do you think they’re a girl?” Jungah asked, then, way more interested in Kyungsoon’s soulmate and who they could be than in Kyungsoon’s petty little problems. “They’re clearly very smart. Do you think they’re a scientist, or something? What if they’re old? What would you do if you end up stuck with a fifty-year-old man? Or a foreigner that doesn’t speak Korean? Would you learn, say, Swedish, for the sake of your soulmate?”

“What?” Kyungsoon asked, finally breaking into a laugh. “Where are all these questions coming from? You’re crazy. What would I have in common with an old Swedish scientist?”

“It’s all within the realm of possibility!” Jungah declared, laughing as well. Kyungsoon really, really wished that she wasn’t right, though, but since that moment, she couldn’t help but keep on wondering who the hell her soulmate could be whenever she caught sight of her left wrist, whether there was something written on her skin or not. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering if she had already met that person, and sometimes, she tried to imagine what they looked like.

But whoever they were, wherever they were, Kyungsoon knew that she would give their ass a whooping the moment she met them in revenge for all the difficulties they put her through.

It was only fair.

☀ ☀ ☀ ☀ ☀

Kyungsoon wanted to be an actress, which probably came as a surprise to many people that knew her.

She had always been very passionate about movies and drama in general, but it wasn’t until the last year of middle school that she realized that acting was her calling. She worked hard every day during high school to get in a good university where she could study acting. She dealt with difficult classes she didn’t give two shits about, she juggled extra-curricular activities and cram school on top of regular school and drama club, and she studied hard on the daily to achieve her dreams.

It was a difficult road, but in the end, she made it.

She graduated high school with a great overall score, she passed her CSATs with marks that exceeded her own expectations, and she got accepted into the college she wanted to go.

It was the same school Taemin had enrolled in the previous year to study dance, and the same school Jungah had gotten accepted into as well, to study the same as her boyfriend-soulmate. Sehyun would be attending a different university to study freaking _physics_ , the mathematically gifted child she was, but they pinky promised each other that they would keep in contact.

Things were great, really.

She loved her campus, she loved her career, and she loved the freedom that college gave her. She loved living in the university’s dorm, and she had soon come to love her roommate. She was one year older than her and also an acting major, a beautiful girl called Kim Junhee with the nicest hair Kyungsoon had ever seen. She came from a well-off, traditional family, but she had rebelled against all that in her own way, by following a career path that was far from traditional. She was a disaster too – probably the messiest person Kyungsoon had ever had to deal with, but most of the time she could overlook that because Junhee often bought her lunch and dinner, and she always had the juiciest gossip.

Kyungsoon liked her. As in, she kind of an actual crush on her. And she wasn’t an expert with relationships, but she thought that maybe Junhee liked her back, at least a little bit. She spoilt her too much and she took great care of her, and not quite in a sisterly way, unless it was normal for sisters to hold hands and lean against each other while watching movies in the dark.

Things were great, they really were.

It even seemed like the marks that showed her bond with her soulmate had stopped appearing for a while, during all of summer break.

However, that couldn’t last long.

And in fact, a few weeks into the new semester, the marks reappeared.

One day, Kyungsoo was sitting on her desk inside their dorm, reading something for one of her classes while Junhee braided her hair, when the marks reappeared.

Kyungsoon’s hair was long and black, and Junhee loved practicing the braiding tutorials she watched on YouTube on her, claiming that she was the best doll in the world because not only was she gorgeous (something she said so casually that it had Kyungsoon choking a little bit), but she could also spend a long time without moving. Kyungsoon enjoyed it a lot, even if sometimes Junhee pulled too hard by accident. Usually they chatted about everything and anything while they played some music, and it was really, really pleasant. The feeling of Junhee’s fingers and her perfect nails stroking over her scalp was therapeutic and relaxing, and they made her melt like putty.

That was exactly what they were doing when a black permanent-marker right triangle started to appear on her skin.

The sight of it made Kyungsoon groan and huff in frustration.

“Not _again_ ,” she complained, still looking at the shapes that were starting to show up on her skin. It was almost nine in the evening of a Wednesday night! What in the world could her soulmate be doing, doodling mathematical formulas onto their skin at a time like that?! It really made no sense at all.

“What happened?” Junhee asked, stopping in the middle of the braid she was doing. “Did I hurt you again, or…?”

“No, not you— look at this!” Kyungsoon said, lifting her left arm up for Junhee to see. “Remember the stupid markings I told you about? They hadn’t appeared in weeks, but now they’re back, and, _ugh_. Honestly, whoever the hell my soulmate is, they really have no common sense at all.”

“Oh my god,” Junhee laughed, delicately taking Kyungsoon’s arm in her hand. “Wow…”

“ _’Wow’_ nothing,” Kyungsoon huffed. “It’s late. And a weekday. Why in the world are they writing mathematical formulas on their _skin_ , of all places? Do they not own a notebook, or anything of the kind?”

The markings and letters kept on appearing, slowly but surely. There weren’t that many, though – just a few formulas here and there that didn’t take up a lot of skin, until they eventually stopped showing up.

“Hey, Kyungsoonnie,” Junhee started, letting go of Kyungsoon’s wrist carefully to go back to doing her hair. “Have you considered that perhaps your soulmate has no idea that what they do shows up in your skin? I don’t think they’d keep on doing this to you if they knew. And if they did, then I doubt they’d be your soulmate in the first place.”

Kyungsoon hummed, eyes still fixed on the permanent marker shapes and running the tip of her finger over the lines. She supposed Junhee was right. The truth was she had never engaged with whoever it was she shared a soul link with, neither before the mathematical formulas first appeared on her arm during a math test back in high school, nor after that. And it _was_ true that she was still pretty young – she was only twenty years old internationally, and she had been even younger than that when the marks of her soulmate bond first became visible. The most common thing was for soulmate bonds to become apparent at around the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, when a person’s character and personality was mostly fully developed. If her soulmate was around her age, then she had no way of knowing whether Kyungsoon could see the marks or not.

“Do you think I should let them know that I’m here, then? That I can read their stuff?” Kyungsoon asked, a little insecure. She rubbed on the ink that had showed up on her skin, though she was careful not to smudge it. The truth was it made her very nervous to engage with her soulmate. Scared, even. She would never be able to undo it, and it would send her one step closer into meeting them, whoever they were, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that. Not yet, at least.

“Yeah,” Junhee said, pretty confidently. “I mean, you don’t have to, of course. It’s your decision. But I think it would be for the best…” Junhee’s own soulmate bond still hadn’t become visible, and she knew that because ever since high school, she had started drawing a cute drop of water on the side of her left thumb every single day, but no mark had ever appeared on her own skin. “I would definitely stop drawing that droplet on my finger if I knew my soulmate was bothered by it. I feel like it’s important to let them know that I’m here, when the bond finally shows, and that’s why I keep on drawing it. Your soulmate, though? They seem to be completely unaware that the bond between you is already showing.”

Kyungsoon sighed heavily, closing her book.

“You’re right,” she admitted, as she reached for her pencil case which was somewhere over her desk. “But it’s scary. I don’t want them to know I’m here.”

“Why not?” Junhee asked while she expertly braided Kyungsoon’s hair. She didn’t sound like she was pressuring her, though – she merely seemed curious.

“I don’t know, I just don’t,” Kyungsoon replied, pulling out a regular blue pen and clicking on it. “I don’t want to meet them like _this_ , you know? If I had it my way, then we’d meet in person, hit it off, and _then_ discover that we’re meant to be, or whatever. I want to be… Free. I think. I don’t know. It sounds stupid, but it is what it is.”

“But, baby, it’s not like you guys have to get married right away,” Junhee said, chuckling. “I understand where you’re coming from, but relax. If you don’t want to meet them yet, nobody says you have to. Just tell them you want them to leave you the hell alone – not with those words, _obviously_ , but you know what I mean.”

“Okay… Okay, I can do that,” Kyungsoon said. It sounded right. It sounded like a good idea. It was still kind of scary to interact with the person that the universe had allegedly chosen for her, but what was the worst that could happen? Junhee was right. It wasn’t like they would have to meet each other right away after this. All it meant was that whoever her soulmate was, they would be aware that the link between them was now visible and that she could see everything that marked their skin. Everything from ink, to moles, to bruises, and to hickeys. No biggie. “I’ll do it, then. I’ll tell them to stop.”

Kyungsoon brought her pen to the back of her left hand. She let a few seconds pass and she took a deep breath before she pressed the tip of her pen to her skin, but then the words _’hey, can you PLEASE stop with the math notes and get a notebook????’_ accompanied by a hand-made grumpy face were written across the skin of her hand.

Junhee gasped when she saw them, though.

“Kyungsoonnie-yah! You didn’t have to be so _mean_!” She nagged, but she laughed heartily at it, accidentally tugging painfully on Kyungsoon’s hair.

“Ow—! Watch it, unnie!” Kyungsoon pretty much barked at her roommate, but she ended up laughing as well, even if it was a nervous kind of laugh. She kept looking at her hand uneasily, waiting for an answer, and luckily for her, she didn’t have to wait more than a few seconds.

The next thing that appeared on her skin was a little message, also in blue pen, that started appearing word by word just below the one she had written herself. For some reason, it surprised her that it was in perfect, if only a little messy Korean scrawl. As far as Kyungsoon knew, her soulmate could’ve been from anywhere in the planet.

__

_Oh my god!!! I had no idea that you could see them too >< I’m sorry if I bothered you. If I had known you could see them I wouldn’t have written them on my skinㅋㅋㅋ how long have you been able to see it, btw??_

Kyungsoon didn’t reply.

Replying would lead to talking, she was _sure_ of it, and she didn’t want any of that. She didn’t want to talk, yet.

She didn’t want to meet her soulmate, yet.

So perhaps it was mean of her, but she left her soulmate hanging.

“Hey, Soonnie-yah,” Junhee asked her later that night, after Kyungsoon had washed all the drawings and words doodled on her skin. The older girl reached with her hand to accommodate one of Kyungsoon’s braids, tracing the shape of it with her fingers and smiling charmingly at her. Flirtily, even. “Wanna watch a movie together?”

Kyungsoon smiled right back.

And that was it.

That was the reason she didn’t want to get involved with her soulmate, yet. Perhaps not Junhee, herself, but more like the concept of seeing what it would feel like to be with someone without the idea of forever looming in front of her.

They would have time, eventually, and of that she was sure.

“Sure,” she told Junhee. “Your bed or mine?”

☀ ☀ ☀ ☀ ☀

Perhaps it was Jungah’s and Taemin’s experience what scared Kyungsoon.

They were perfect together.

They really were.

Kyungsoon met both of them, as well as Sehyun, back in middle school, and they all befriended each other pretty easily.

None of them was very talkative, but they were never afraid or shy about geeking out about the things they liked with each other, which allowed them to bond quickly. Kyungsoon really came to love the group of friends she had found for herself, and they stuck together through the years.

However, there was no denying that there was something different about Jungah and Taemin that was almost scary.

They could just be sitting there, eating a Choco Pie during recess and holding hands inconspicuously, but everything about their actions seemed to have the word _forever_ written all over them. It was as endearing as it was unsettling. Later on, during high school, the profoundness of their bond only seemed to become more evident. Jungah had gotten very antsy during the first months of their last year, and it was all because Taemin was no longer in high school with them. She started caring less about her grades and focusing more on dance, but there were times when she missed Taemin so much that she actually skipped school to be able to be with him.

It was almost ridiculous, and Kyungsoon had often tried talking to her about that, but Jungah hadn’t wanted to hear it. She told Kyungsoon that she ‘didn’t understand what it felt like’ – she said it was as if a piece of your soul was out there instead of next to you, where it belonged. Kyungsoon supposed that the degree of how much Jungah and Taemin needed each other had a lot to do with the fact that neither of them were old enough nor mature enough to be their own persons without each other. They had found each other so early in their lives, and they had never been apart for longer than a few days, so they never really got to experience being their own self.

And that was what scared Kyungsoon.

Kyungsoon had no doubt that whenever she found her soulmate, she’d be happy with them. She’d seen that work in the people around her, starting from her parents, her aunts and uncles, her grandparents, and even in Jungah and Taemin— they all seemed happy and satisfied with each other. But she didn’t want to rush into it without getting to experience other things, and that included other people. 

She wanted to experience failure.

It was only a matter of time before Junhee and her started to fool around with each other.

It was nothing serious, but that was exactly what Kyungsoon was looking for.

One night when they were watching a movie together, Junhee rested her hand on Kyungsoon’s thigh. It was just above her knee, on Kyungsoon’s warm flesh, and it made her breath hitch when the older girl started stroking her skin in slight, teasing circles. Kyungsoon had dated once before, by the beginning of high school, so she had kissed before. But the kisses Junhee gave her were so different from the ones she had back then – they were gentle, sweet, and hot. They were full of warmth and emotion, but completely devoid of love and passion. They were detached because there was a knowledge inside both of them that this was only for the time being: until Junhee found her soulmate, and Kyungsoon deemed herself ready to meet her own. There was tacit agreement in all of it, that whatever happened, nothing would be permanent.

Kyungsoon liked Junhee, and Junhee admitted to liking her too, nevermind what the universe said about soulmates, so it was easy to fall into it.

That night, it was easy to follow Junhee’s lead and let her pin her down on her bed. It was easy to touch and let herself be touched, it was easy to rid herself of her pajama shorts and old t-shirt combo, to rid Junhee of her own Marvel-themed pajamas, and to just _feel_.

Junhee was more experienced, and it showed. It showed in the way she kissed Kyungsoon’s neck while she held her from behind, telling her to relax and enjoy herself and slipping her right hand between Kyungsoon’s spread legs. In the way she made Kyungsoon come undone in a matter of minutes, and in the way she guided Kyungsoon through it all.

“This doesn’t mean we are dating, right…?” Kyungsoon asked Junhee afterwards. The older girl was sitting up on the bed, pulling her pretty brown hair up onto a messy bun, her pale back all bare for Kyungsoon to admire.

“Not if you don’t want to,” Junhee replied, shrugging and looking at her over her shoulder with an honest smile that Kyungsoon couldn’t help but return.

☀ ☀ ☀ ☀ ☀

One of the hardest things about college, Kyungsoon discovered, is getting your and your friends’ schedules to match and finding a date where everybody is available and relatively free so you can hang out without anyone missing.

Sehyun’s university was pretty much on the other side of the city, so it wasn’t until very late in the year that they were finally able to go out with her again, all three of them.

“Have you gotten shorter, unnie?” Sehyun asked Kyungsoon, tongue-in-cheek, the moment they met in the accorded place. It was a crowded, illuminated corner just outside a subway station. There was music playing from nearby shops, cars rushing up and down the streets, and the smell of street food was ever-present and almost visible in the cold evening, puffs of steam coming from food carts all around getting illuminated by bright, colorful lights. Sehyun was as pretty as ever, but she was also taller than ever, wearing heeled boots that had her towering even over Jungah. Kyungsoon rolled her eyes, but she still pulled the younger girl into a hug.

“Fuck off,” she said, but she chuckled when she heard Sehyun laughing.

“You’re going to be the tallest person in the club with those shoes,” Jungah commented to the youngest girl as they hugged each other in greeting. “You should let me borrow them sometime.”

“You’d need to wear like, fifty pairs of socks, but sure,” Sehyun told her, shrugging easily. “That way we’d have an excuse to meet up sooner. Seriously. You two abandoned me since college started. You’ve completely forgotten about me!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyungsoon rolled her eyes, though she couldn’t deny it was a little bit true. She had been spending a great amount of time with Junhee, after all, despite the fact they weren’t dating.

“She’s always around Junhee-unnie,” Jungah commented as they finally started walking down the street. The plan was getting full on street food, drinking beer somewhere where it wouldn’t be expensive, and then heading to a club Jungah and Kyungsoon had been to a few weeks ago with Taemin and Taemin’s friends. “You know, her roommate?”

“I still haven’t met her, but yeah,” Sehyun replied. “You’ve mentioned her a lot before. I’d like to meet her someday. You have to introduce us, stop keeping your new friends to yourselves.”

“I can ask her to come along next time,” Kyungsoon offered, blushing a little bit despite herself. “And, hey, don’t give us that – you haven’t introduced us to any of your new friends.”

“That’s because she doesn’t have any,” Jungah mocked, sticking her tongue out at Sehyun, who punched the other girl in the arm in retaliation. Jungah laughed loudly, moving to hide behind Kyungsoon despite it not being a very strategical idea, and Kyungsoon joined in.

It had been a while.

 

The club wasn’t very big, but it wasn’t small either. It had two floors, a bar in each floor, seats and tables here and there, and a dancefloor on the bottom floor, underground. It was nice, and Kyungsoon already knew her way around it, which always helped her feeling more at ease.

Her feet hurt, though.

Jungah and Sehyun were both avid lovers of dancing, so they made a bee-line for the dancefloor as soon as they arrived. Kyungsoon joined them, obviously, and for a long while they just had fun together, but Kyungsoon didn’t have the stamina nor the passion for dancing that her friends had. She was thirsty, too, and unlike Jungah, she wasn’t used to sweating too much. That’s why she excused herself, not without telling her friends that she would be at the bar if they needed her for anything.

She ordered herself a bottle of beer, and she sat on one of the stools, spinning around on it so her back was against the bar.

She pulled out her phone as she took a swig from her beer, and using just one hand, she texted Junhee.

 

**From: Do Kyungsoon (sent at 1:16 AM)**  
_Unnie… You really have to come with us next time_

**From: Do Kyungsoon (sent at 1:16 AM)**  
_They’re both dancing machines and I can’t keep up -_- I need you to keep me company at the bar_

 

**From: Kim Junhee (sent at 1:17 AM)**  
_what makes you think I wouldn’t want to dance ㅋㅋㅋ_

 

**From: Do Kyungsoon (sent at 1:17 AM)**  
_:(_

 

**From: Kim Junhee (sent at 1:17 AM)**  
_ㅋㅋㅋdon’t make that face_

**From: Kim Junhee (sent at 1:18 AM)**  
_are you not having fun? :(_

 

Kyungsoon was replying, typing as quickly as she could while using only one of her thumbs, when suddenly—

When suddenly, somebody tapped on her arm.

“Hey?” the person asked, pulling their hand away quickly when Kyungsoon snapped her head to look up. 

The person, it turned out, was a girl. A very, very tall girl. Taller than Sehyun in those ridiculous heeled boots of hers. Kyungsoon had been expecting a greasy dude, so she was a little taken aback when she saw this girl. She was pretty, very much so, and in a way that seemed very effortless, very natural. Her eyes were huge and round, and although her irises seemed black in the darkness of the club, there were colorful lights dancing all over them. Kyungsoon wasn’t really sure whether they emanated from the girl’s eyes or if they were reflections of the club’s lights. Whatever it was, they were captivating— they made Kyungsoon feel like the air had gotten punched out of her lungs, and they made her jaw drop a little bit despite herself.

The girl had long straight hair which she had dyed a light shade that Kyungsoon couldn’t quite pinpoint under the colorful lights, and she had pushed all of it over one of her shoulders. And speaking of shoulders, hers were very much exposed by the loose tank top she was wearing. Her shoulders and her sharp collarbones. And her subtle cleavage. Kyungsoon glanced a little lower and noticed that she could also see the girl’s black bandeau and her ribs, all because the sleeve holes of her tank top were fucking _huge_.

“Hey?” Kyungsoon replied, finally focusing back on the girl’s face. She hadn’t noticed before, but her ears were pretty large. They were cute, though, and her lobe was lined with tiny black piercings. “Uhm, what is it?”

The girl’s eyes were open wide as they, too, travelled over Kyungsoon. She should’ve felt embarrassed at being checked out, but she didn’t. She had done the same thing, after all. If anything, she wanted the girl to think she was hot, too, so sat a little more straightly on the stool, pushing her shoulders back and fixing her posture. According to all her friends (and Junhee), she had a great rack, so she better put it to work.

“I, uh,” the girl said, straining her voice to make herself heard over the loud music. When she looked at Kyungsoon again, she grinned, and the sight of her bright, toothy smile nearly blinded Kyungsoon and threw her off her chair. She was so beautiful, for fuck’s sake— even more so as she ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back with a large hand. She shook her head. “I just wanted to ask you if the seat next to you was occupied. But I, uh… Yeah. Ha-ha. You’re, uhm…”

“It’s not occupied,” Kyungsoon told her, a little mechanically. She had followed the girl’s every single move with her eyes, and it was making her dizzy. She felt herself smiling, and she made a gesture at the chair next to her. “You can sit if you want.”

The tall girl grinned even more widely, if that was possible.

“Great!” she exclaimed, though it took her a few seconds to move to the actual chair because they were still looking at each other. It was weird. Kyungsoon usually wasn’t good with strangers, much less with hot girls that were taller than her by at least an entire head, but there she was, unable to stop smiling at a tall, hot girl she had only just met. She looked down at her phone and saw that Junhee had sent her a selfie while she waited for her reply. It was a pretty one, because Junhee was pretty and all her selfies were pretty, and it also had a lot of cleavage and even the hint of a lacy purple bra, which made it a ten-out-of-ten selfie. But Kyungsoon locked her phone and put it away in her pocket.

She turned around to look at the tall girl next to her.

She was ordering something, and she was making a lot of hand gestures at the bartender. She was really beautiful even gesticulating like that. Her light-colored hair reached around the middle of her back, and Kyungsoon had to stop herself from imagining what it would feel like to run her fingers through it. She took another swig from her beer as she watched her, like the absolute creep she absolute _was not_. Before too long, though, the bartender was gone, and the girl was looking at her again.

She put her elbow on the glossy surface of the bar to prop her head up as she turned her head to look at Kyungsoon.

“You’re, uhm, you’re here alone?” The girl asked her, still smiling.

Kyungsoon shook her head, feeling a strange mix of anxiety and utter calm spreading across her body.

“I’m with my friends, actually,” she told the girl, who nodded. “They’re out there dancing, though.”

“And you?” The girl asked again, tilting her head curiously. “You don’t dance?”

“I do, I’m just tired, I guess,” Kyungsoon replied. “But what about you? You’re here alone?”

“Nah,” the girl answered, easily, chuckling for no reason. “I’m also with my friends. Two of them. The third one ditched us, so we’re uneven tonight. It kinda sucks. The two friends I’m with— they’re soulmates, you know? And they only met each other last year. So… Yeah, I guess they can be annoying sometimes. We were at a booth, but man, they clearly wanted me out of there a-s-a-p.”

Kyungsoon wrinkled her nose at that, though she laughed imagining this poor tall adorable human being stuck with two people that were constantly all over each other.

“It sounds harsh,” she told her, sympathetically, and she was surprised by how honestly she meant it. “You can stick around with me if you want. I don’t mind.”

“Oh, really? That’d be awesome!” the girl told her, clearly excited by the prospect. It made Kyungsoon laugh again— god, since when did Kyungsoon even laugh so much? The girl was still smiling, but her smile became a little coy when she went on, “but you have to tell me your name, first.”

“Oh, I _have_ to?” Kyungsoon asked – _flirted_ , her brain accused her. She looked down at her beer bottle as she pushed a strand of black hair behind her ear. “I’m the one doing you a favor, offering you my company. You should tell me your name first.”

“Sure,” The girl said, shrugging. Just then, the bartender handed her drink to her, which was a very colorful cocktail, fuchsia at the bottom and yellow at the top. Kyungsoon lifted her eyebrows at it and then watched the girl take a long sip from the black straw. She sighed in satisfaction, and the sound bounced within the walls of Kyungsoon’s mind, somehow louder than the bass of whatever song was playing. “I’m Park Chanmi.”

“What?” Kyungsoon asked, acting as if she hadn’t heard her. She had no idea where all this boldness was coming from, but she supposed she could blame it on the alcohol she had had to drink so far (even though she hadn’t had that much to begin with). She leaned forward, closer to the tall girl, putting a hand on her ear.

Chanmi chuckled, leaning closer to speak her name into Kyungsoon’s ear, nose accidentally bumping against Kyungsoon’s hand.

“Park Chanmi!” She said, her voice bubbly and bright. “At your service.”

“Oh, wow, okay. Nice to meet you, Park Chanmi,” Kyungsoon told the taller girl, smiling at her. For some reason, it didn’t feel wrong for her to be all up in her personal space. In fact, Kyungsoon thought she actually kind of liked it. Her presence. It was warm and sunny, fresh and happy. It was magnetic. It made Kyungsoon lean in and place her hand on Chanmi’s bicep momentarily so she could speak into her ear. “I’m Do Kyungsoon.”

“Do Kyungsoon,” Chanmi repeated, as if savoring her name. Kyungsoon nodded at her, and Chanmi grinned. “Nice to meet you, too.”

They didn’t talk much more after that, mostly because it wasn’t easy to do so. The music was very loud, and they busied themselves with their drinks, but they still chatted a little bit. Most of all, they made comments about the club, about the music, and about the prices of the drinks sold in the bar. Eventually, though, Chanmi was done with her drink, and she asked Kyungsoon if she would like to dance.

“You don’t have to worry about making a fool of yourself, because chances are I’m gonna do that for the two of us,” Chanmi assured her, towering over her when she stood back up. Damn, she was really tall, and her shirt really showed off a lot of her skin. It had Kyungsoon’s mind racing a little bit.

“Okay, fine, but not for too long. I told my friends I’d be at the bar, and if they don’t find me there—“ she started, but then Chanmi cut her off.

“—yes, yes, of course! It’s just for a little while. I just don’t want to waste my chance of dancing with such a pretty girl as you,” she said, winking saucily at Kyungsoon in a way that should make her cringe. Instead, though, she rolled her eyes, but she found herself smiling in amusement and slight secondhand embarrassment.

“Ugh, cheap lines? Seriously?” She told the taller girl as she followed her into the crowded dancefloor. She had to wrap her fingers around her wrist, and the contact was sending surges of warmth and electricity through her nervous system. It was kind of sad that she had to let go of her when they found a decent spot where they could dance. Sehyun and Jungah were nowhere to be found, and that was actually comforting for Kyungsoon in this situation. They wouldn’t stop giving her hell if they saw her dancing with a girl she met at the bar of the club.

“Is it really a line if I mean it honestly?” Chanmi asked her, grinning down at her as she started to move. It was true that her movements were a little clumsy, but she wasn’t bad or embarrassing. Not to Kyungsoon, at least. She thought she herself was way worse. But she danced, too, because how could she not? How could she leave Chanmi hanging?

They danced for a while, but something strange happened.

Something that Kyungsoon had never experienced before.

She had an irresistible urge of touching Chanmi.

Not sexually, or anything, it was just— she just needed to feel her.

She needed to drag her hands over the taller girl’s arms and stroke her warm skin with her fingers. She needed to feel her touching her own skin, be it her hands, her arms, or her hips. It was irresistible, and whatever it was, it seemed that Chanmi could feel it too because she never strayed too far from Kyungsoon, and she too kept her hands on her.

The music pounding from the club speakers was loud and the beat was fast, but at a certain point, Kyungsoon turned around so that her back was against Chanmi’s front, and Chanmi’s arms quickly found their way around her waist.

They were definitely off-beat, and they were pretty much just _hugging_ in the middle of a crowded, sweaty dancefloor, but Kyungsoon felt like she could fall asleep between the taller girl’s arms. Her warmth was enveloping her, drowning her and pulling her in. The feeling of her arms wrapped loosely around her body was comforting and wonderful, and Kyungsoon had no idea what it was about this girl she had met less than an hour ago, but she really couldn’t resist her. She thought perhaps it was the _idea_ of her what affected her so terribly. She had never tried flirting much whenever she happened to step out to a club or a bar, and that was mostly because she had all the loving she might need either sitting next to her or waiting for her in her own room. This time she hadn’t even been trying to flirt when all of a sudden, one of the prettiest girls Kyungsoon had ever seen (and she had seen plenty) fell on her lap –metaphorically speaking— and started flirting with her.

That had to be it, right? The novelty. It had to be that what had Kyungsoon feeling like her brain and her blood were drowning in adrenaline.

That was as close as they got to each other before they decided to head back to the bar. Jungah and Sehyun were probably looking for her, and Chanmi’s own friends (Baekhee and Jungda were their names, Kyungsoon had learned), might be wondering where the hell Chanmi had gone.

“So, hey, uh, I was thinking,” Chanmi told her moments later, scratching the back of her neck sheepishly. They were already standing by the bar, both of them way more disheveled than they had been when they met after the time they had spent at the dancefloor together. Chanmi’s cheeks were flushed, it seemed, and she was sweating a little. Her neck and her collarbones were glistening prettily, at least, and a shiver ran down Kyungsoon’s spine when she imagined that the hair at the back of Chanmi’s neck was probably drenched in sweat.

“Hm?” Kyungsoon asked, tilting her head as she looked up at her. She didn’t feel ready to say goodbye to Chanmi yet.

“Would you like to keep in touch?” Chanmi asked, smiling at her. “I mean… I’d like that. Very much. You’re really very… I don’t know… Very woah. You know? You’re cool and nice. But we didn’t get to talk much, and that _sucks_ so bad.”

Kyungsoon couldn’t help but laugh. Chanmi was ranting, and it was as cute as it was funny.

“Yeah, I’d like that, actually. I don’t think I got to know that much about you,” Kyungsoon told her, smiling. Her cheeks were hurting from all the smiling she had been doing since Chanmi first talked to her, which was probably a good sign.

“Well, we can fix that very easily, you know?” the taller girl said, and then—

Then, she told Kyungsoon to _’hold on a second’_ and she sprinted towards the bar’s cash register. She talked for a moment with the girl sitting behind it, she grinned at her, bowed repeatedly, and then proceeded to go back to where Kyungsoon was.

“Okay!” she exclaimed, making it sound like she had just completed an odyssey. “Give me your hand, for a second.”

Kyungsoon quirked an eyebrow at her at that, but she chuckled. “Okay?” She said, but she obliged, handing out her hand for the taller girl to grab.

Chanmi grabbed her by the wrist with her left hand, her grip strong but gentle, and then she carefully turned Kyungsoon’s hand so that the back of it was facing up. What she saw then, made her laugh. Chanmi had gotten a pen from the girl at the register, and she took it to Kyungsoon’s hand.

“What are you doing!” Kyungsoon exclaimed, but she didn’t stop Chanmi. It was kind of cute, actually. Kind of very cute. Kind of endearing, too.

“I’m giving you my number, obviously, what else!” Chanmi replied, laughing as she wrote the digits onto Kyungsoon’s skin.

“This is ridiculous—” Kyungsoon tried to complain, but she couldn’t. She simply shook her head as she watched as the tall girl wrote. But then she saw it. Chanmi’s hand. The back of her right hand. A few digits had started appearing onto it, as if by magic. The sight of it, of _numbers magically showing up on skin_ , was far too familiar for her. The _shapes_ of these numbers in particular, too, were also far too familiar. And just as Chanmi curved the pen around the lower part of a number five, the same number five showed up on her own skin—

And it was as if a bucket of cold water had fallen on Kyungsoon’s head.

She looked up at Chanmi, then, her eyes wide and her brow furrowing more and more.

She remembered, then.

She remembered the first time all those ridiculous mathematical formulas had showed up on her skin right before a test. She remembered how those formulas sent her to detention and marred her perfect record during high school. She remembered not being able to wear anything but long sleeves to keep the embarrassing doodles and drawings concealed from the world.

Most of all, though, she remembered the frustration of feeling like her time to live her life whatever way she wanted was up. Of knowing that the clock was already ticking and that the stars were already aligned for her, her path chosen and decided by somebody that wasn’t her. That she had a soulmate, now, and she better find them soon to start living with them.

And it made sense, she supposed.

It made sense that she was so attracted to Chanmi.

She was _supposed_ to be attracted to her, nevermind that they hadn’t gotten to talk that much so she didn’t really know her yet.

“It’s you,” Kyungsoon muttered to herself under her breath, still watching as the rest of Chanmi’s phone number appeared on her own skin as she wrote it onto Kyungsoon’s. Chanmi hummed in question, and then Kyungsoon looked up at her, frowning. “It’s _you_!”, she repeated, louder this time.

“Me?” Chanmi asked, clearly weirded out by Kyungsoon’s reaction. “What…?”

Kyungsoon nearly huffed.

“Look at this—” she said, moving her hand to put it right next to Chanmi’s. She tried not to feel too small even though her arm was a fraction of Chanmi’s. The numbers that Chanmi had written on her had shown up on Chanmi’s own skin as she wrote them. “It’s _you_.”

Chanmi gasped next to her, and she turned to look at her slowly, her jaw agape.

“Holy shit…” she muttered, a grin growing fast on her face. “Holy shit! It’s me! And it’s you! I mean— it’s us! We’re…! We’re—!”

“—Soulmates, yes,” Kyungsoon completed. Chanmi seemed so happy, that Kyungsoon almost felt guilty about the heavy feeling that took over her. It was overwhelming. She felt relieved, in a way, but at the same time, she also felt scared, angry, anxious. Chanmi placed her hand on her hip, and the touch sent a jolt of electricity down her spine. It had her pulling backwards, her lower back bumping against an empty stool. “Please don’t touch me, Chanmi, okay? This is— This is far too much.”

“Is it?” Chanmi asked, clearly still excited even if she did what Kyungsoon told her and she pulled her hand back. “I-I mean… It is, of course, but like— wow! No wonder I couldn’t stop _looking_ at you the moment I saw you. You felt that too, right?”

Kyungsoon frowned a little more deeply. She had felt that too, of course. She hadn’t been able to look away from Chanmi for a long time. She had felt like she could look at her eyes for _years_ , even. It was awful.

“Can we please not talk about this now? I’ll lose my patience if we do. Do you know that I got detention in high school because of you?” Kyungsoon said, looking up at Chanmi with annoyance showing in her eyes. “I had never been to detention in my life, but because of you— seriously! What kind of person draws so much on their arms?! And so often, too?! The first time your stupid mathematical formulas, or whatever they are, appeared on my arm I was ready to _murder_ you!”

Chanmi looked… Confused.

And in hindsight, perhaps it was kind of unfair for Kyungsoon to call her out like this when the other girl wasn’t even aware that Kyungsoon had been there, reading the marks that showed up on her skin, for way longer than she imagined.

“Detention…? You’re in high school…?” Chanmi asked, a little scared. “You’re in— holy shit, you’re not a minor, are you?”

Kyungsoon huffed and stomped her foot.

“No, I’m not! But even if I was—” she started, but she stopped herself soon. She wasn’t even sure why she was so annoyed. Chanmi had been pretty much the definition of perfect, and Kyungsoon had been into her the moment she saw her. But it really was too much. She took a deep breath to calm herself down. “I’m not in high school. And I’m not a minor. So rest assured, or whatever.”

Chanmi pouted, and she tried reaching forward for Kyungsoon.

“Hey, Kyungsoonie…” she began, but before she could say anything or even touch Kyungsoon, Jungah and Sehyun arrived to her side.

“Here you are, unnie!” Jungah said, her arms wrapping themselves around Kyungsoon’s in a hug. She was grinning dopily, and her breath smelled of beer, but Kyungsoon had never been happier to see her. “We were looking for you all over the place, right Sehyun-ah?”

“Yeah, we were even upstairs, and—” Sehyun said, but then she gasped in surprise when she saw Chanmi. “Chanmi-unnie!”

“Sehyun-ah?!” Chanmi exclaimed, looking more confused with every second that passed by, but her face visibly illuminated at the sight of the youngest girl. She grinned at her, and they hugged each other. They were both so tall it would’ve been funny if Kyungsoon wasn’t about to explode. “I thought you said you were busy and you couldn’t come out with us tonight?!”

“I was! I told you I had plans with my friends from high school. If I had known guys were coming to the same place, we could’ve all come together in the first place!” Sehyun said, chuckling as Chanmi rubbed a hand over her shoulder.

“Wait a minute, you know each other?” Kyungsoon asked, looking between Chanmi and Sehyun and how friendly and comfortable they seemed around each other. She sighed.

After this, she really needed to lie down for a week or two.

“Yes, she’s my senior, and she helps me with calculus,” Sehyun explained, “how do _you_ know each other, though?”

Kyungsoon looked up at Chanmi for a moment, and she felt a myriad of emotions, all at the same time. She felt like she was about to catch on fire.

“It’s a long story. I want to go back, I’m not feeling well,” Kyungsoon said, and Jungah instantly held her a little more tightly.

“We can call a cab if you want,” Jungah said, frowning worriedly. “It’s pretty late, too. It’s okay if we go back.”

Kyungsoon really, really loved Jungah. If finding her soulmate at such an early stage of life had taught her something, it was to always love and care for others within her possibilities.

She didn’t say much more to Chanmi after that.

She only looked at her, and when she did, the tall girl made a gesture at the numbers written on the back of her own hand, a little pout on her face.

 _‘Call me’_ , she mouthed at Kyungsoon’s direction. _‘Please.’_

Kyungsoon swore that she could hear her talking inside her head, telling her not to go, and the necessity of staying right there with Chanmi was almost overbearing.

Almost, but not entirely.

She was glad that Junhee was asleep when she made it back to the dorm that night. She almost couldn’t sleep, and she spent long moments looking at the numbers scrawled in blue pen across the back of her hand while something powerful gnawed at her heart and yelled at her for leaving Chanmi’s side.

She hated it.

She didn’t want to feel like that.

It wasn’t until a few words appeared on her skin, just below the phone number, that she was able to feel more at ease and fall asleep.

_Good night._

☀ ☀ ☀ ☀ ☀

Kyungsoon didn’t call Chanmi.

She was a coward, she knew very well, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

What could she say if she did call her, anyway? _’Hey, I’m your soulmate. The universe says we should get married, or something, so let’s get to it’_ didn’t seem like the right thing. But then again, nothing seemed like the right thing.

If Chanmi was just a girl she had met at the club whom she happened to be into, she would’ve definitely texted her. But she wasn’t just that.

She was way more than that.

She was her _soulmate_.

And Kyungsoon had no idea how to deal with that.

Chanmi left her alone, for the most part, so it was easy to ignore the problem for the first few days.

One day, though, when Kyungsoon was about to take a shower in the morning, she found something.

It was a little message written in blue ink on the inner part of her forearm.

__

_have a nice day today._

That was all it said. Simple, to the point, and probably not too hard to remove.

It was just a few characters, and it shouldn’t have meant much, but the sight of them made Kyungsoon’s breath catch in her throat. It made her run her fingers over the message just for the sake of touching it. Chanmi was out there, somewhere, hoping Kyungsoon had a nice day, while all Kyungsoon could do was hide like a child.

It was horrible.

It made her feel even worse.

But it also made her want to be better.

Or try, at least.

For Chanmi’s sake.

She didn’t hate her, not in the slightest.

But it was scary. It was _terrifying_. Not Chanmi, but their entire situation. It felt like a lot of pressure, knowing that she was supposed to get to know Chanmi for better or for worse because she would be stuck with her until she _died_ —

But she tried not to think about that.

She went back to the room, searched for a pen, and then wrote on the back of her hand.

__

_you too._

Chanmi didn’t reply to her message, but the single fact that she had been able to write it had made her feel better. Lighter. It felt good to know that Chanmi was there. It felt comforting to know that Chanmi would be able to see her message, read it, and know that she didn’t hate her. That she wasn’t mad at her, or anything of the like.

Well, perhaps she had been once, but now, all that frustration she had felt at the beginning seemed so ridiculous and petty.

She hadn’t talked with Chanmi properly yet, but she seemed like a very sweet person. Goofy, even. Clumsy, a little reckless, but with not an ounce of bad intentions in her tall, tall body.

The day after that, she woke up to a different message written on the same place, to which she replied accordingly. They didn’t really interact throughout the rest of the day, but every morning since that day, they wished each other a good morning. Sometimes Chanmi wrote a joke, or something of the like, and it had Kyungsoon laughing despite herself. One day in late November, the message she got was a little different.

__

_i know we don’t really know each other yet (something that we should fix soon, if you ask me), but today is my birthday and a birthday wish from you would really make my day :-D_

It made Kyungsoon snort when she read it, but she rushed to get her pen to be able to reply.

It was Chanmi’s birthday! It was her soulmate’s birthday! It filled Kyungsoon with joy, though she couldn’t really explain why it did. Knowing something like that about her soulmate, like the day when she had begun to _exist_ , it had her heart pounding in her chest. It had her feeling proud and happy, though she wasn’t very sure why. At the same time, paradoxically, it made her sad. It made her wish she could be there with Chanmi to celebrate her day with her, nevermind that they didn’t know much about each other. She should be there, shouldn’t she?

__

_oh!! Happy birthday! have a wonderful day~_

__

_and I guess you’re right… we should fix that_

Chanmi replied almost instantly with a happy face and an excited _’thank you!!!’_ , but then more words started to appear.

__

_it’s just… you just left all of a sudden the other day…_

__

_we didn’t even get to talk a little bit and get to know each other :(_

Kyungsoon sighed when she read Chanmi’s message, and something that felt a lot like shame and regret invaded her. It was true, though; she had left far too suddenly.

She was about to reply when she noticed that Chanmi was writing yet another message, this time right below the one she had just written. They were starting to move down Kyungsoon’s wrist since her hand was running out of space to write, and Kyungsoon absentmindedly wondered if the fact that Chanmi’s hands were way bigger than hers made any difference. 

__

_and you never called me either :(_

Kyungsoon pouted at the message, a pang of sadness hitting her. She kept her reply simple and honest.

__

_I’m sorry… I was scared._

__

_still am…_

She took a deep breath as she looked at the series of message that started all the way at her hand. They’d be a pain to remove afterwards.

__

_don’t be! I’m sure we can figure things out…_

__

_when we meet, of course ;)_

Of course she added a winky face at the end.

Of course.

Kyungsoon smiled.

__

_yeah… when we meet ^^_

☀ ☀ ☀ ☀ ☀

Not too long passed before they addressed the topic again.

Just the day after Chanmi’s birthday, they decided to pick a date and a place where they could meet. Chanmi had suggested a coffee shop, but since the two of them had class until pretty late in the afternoon, they decided to go to a bar after class that very Friday.

Kyungsoon was… excited.

She was scared, yes, but most of all, she was eager to see Chanmi again.

She had talked to Jungah and Sehyun about it all. Sehyun nearly had a heart attack when she heard one of her high school best friends was actually the soulmate of one of her new best friends, but aside from that, they both listened to her. They were happy for her, naturally, but they also told her that if she didn’t feel ready to meet her soulmate and really get to know them yet, then she didn’t have to do it.

“I mean, it’s not like you’re inevitably bounded to them forever and ever,” Jungah told her, playing with the straw of her matcha green tea latte. “You’ll just… Want to be with them. You’ll want to share your life with them and make them a part of it. That’s basically it, that’s what it’s about.”

“I hate feeling like I’m forced to get to know a person, though,” Kyungsoon sighed, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that it wasn’t quite like that. She actually wanted to see Chanmi again. She wanted to see her, get to know her, and not less importantly, she kind of really wanted to _feel_ her in a physical way. The image of the tall girl had been burnt onto her brain even after meeting her one time, and her touch had left _something_ behind that Kyungsoon needed more of.

“But do you really not like her at all? Soulmate-stuff aside, of course— are you really not into her, at least? Physically, even?” Sehyun asked her, raising a curious eyebrow. “Cause, I mean— unnie’s pretty as fuck. And she knows a bunch of sick skateboard tricks. If you don’t want her, can I have her?”

Well, Kyungsoon supposed she couldn’t deny any of that.

Talking to her friends made her a little bit more confident, but she had yet to talk to Junhee about it.

She had avoided her roommate’s advances ever since she met Chanmi, but she had never talked to her about it either. Junhee never pressured her into anything, and it was really as if nothing had changed between them save for the fact that they didn’t sleep together on a regular basis. But Kyungsoon still felt like she had to let the older girl know that she had met her soulmate, that she would probably keep on meeting her, and so, things between them would change.

It wasn’t until Friday, when she was getting ready for her ‘date’ after class that she talked to Junhee about it.

The older girl had walked in on Kyungsoon trying to pull up the zipper of her dress, and she had laughed and made fun of her before rushing to her help.

“You’re going out?” Junhee asked, casually, fixing Kyungsoon’s dress and then picking at some strands of her black hair thoughtfully. “You want me to do your hair?”

“Eh, it’s not necessary,” Kyungsoon assured her, but in the end, she still ended up sitting on her desk while Junhee braided a small french braid that started from Kyungsoon’s fringe and framed her face.

“I’m actually, uh… I’m actually going to meet my soulmate today,” Kyungsoon told the older girl, thankful for the fact that there was no mirror where she could see her expression. That would’ve only added more stress to an already stressful situation. “She’s a girl from Sehyunnie’s university. She’s her senior, actually, and they are friends. But we met by chance— isn’t that strange?”

Junhee hummed at that.

“Let me guess— did you meet her that night you went out with your friends?” she asked, and then she chuckled before adding. “You’ve been acting really weird since then, so I figured something must’ve happened to you. Is that it?”

Kyungsoon nodded, but Junhee chastised her for moving by swatting her at the top of her head.

“Was it anything like you expected it to be?” she asked, then. “Did it disappoint you, or did it meet your expectations?”

“I don’t think I ever had any expectations about that moment, actually. It was weird. And intense. It was so intense, actually, that when I realized she was my soulmate it actually made a lot of sense,” Kyungsoon explained, and Junhee seemed to understand. She seemed to understand not only what Kyungsoon was actually speaking, but also what she was implying. Her hands didn’t linger on her shoulders anymore, and she didn’t stroke Kyungsoon’s scalp the same way.

“So I guess that you got what you wanted, after all,” Junhee told her, when Kyungsoon was about to leave. “One time you told me that you wished that something like that happened to you. That you met your soulmate by chance in a random place, hit it off with them, and _then_ , after all of that, you realized that you were soulmates. Remember?”

Kyungsoon did remember. She stopped tying the laces of her boots by the door as she recalled— that day had been the last time Chanmi had written mathematical formulas on her arm. Chanmi had tried to engage with her by writing a message on her skin, but Kyungsoon had promptly ignored it. Not too long after that, they had stumbled into each other and now they were trapped in each other’s orbit.

Huh.

It seemed that the universe really took its job seriously when it came to pairing people up.

 

“So…” Kyungsoon started, looking across the table at Chanmi.

“So,” the taller girl echoed, nodding her head as she spoke. There was a little smile on her face that only grew wider when her eyes met Kyungsoon’s. She was drinking beer instead of a colorful cocktail this time, and the way she was playing with the condensation that gathered on the surface of her bottle, sliding her fingertips up and down the glass, was really distracting, so Kyungsoon forced herself to keep her eyes away from Chanmi’s hands.

“How do we get this started?” Kyungsoon asked, chuckling a little awkwardly even if she wasn’t really feeling uncomfortable. She had been nervous since before she had even left her dorm, and the ball of nerves in her stomach had only grown larger and larger until it dissolved into nothingness the moment she saw Chanmi again. Really. It vanished. All her anxiety, all her bad thoughts, all her worries, all of it – it was all gone.

The only thing in her brain was how badly she had _missed_ Chanmi even though she had never even gotten to talk to her that much. All that remained was the feeling of Chanmi’s hands holding her by the hips, warmth seeping through the fabric of her shirt and into her skin. All Kyungsoon could think about was how stupid she had been for not agreeing to call Chanmi before, for not trying to reach out for her sooner, for making her feel like she had done something wrong when really, all Kyungsoon had to do was grow some balls.

“From the beginning, I suppose?” Chanmi answered, laughing. Her legs were long under the table, and suddenly her foot bumped against Kyungsoon. Kyungsoon nearly jumped at that, but then she realized that it hadn’t been an accident— that Chanmi was purposely reaching out for her. And so, she let her, and she sought her out as well, albeit shyly, playing dumb as she took a sip from her own bottle of beer. Chanmi continued, “you know, at the club the other night…? My original intention was to, uhm… It was to pick you up.”

“What, are you serious?” Kyungsoon gaped at her, amused.

Chanmi nodded.

“Yes, completely serious! I wanted to, uh, you know… Buy you a drink. Dance a little, maybe. Take you home, hopefully,” Kyungsoon snorted at that, but that didn’t make Chanmi relent. The illumination in the bar was bad, but Kyungsoon was sure that a blush had spread on her cheeks. “You were a pretty girl on your phone sitting by the bar, all by yourself, okay? I thought I had a chance to score!”

“Turns out you did,” the shorter girl commented, blushing a little bit.

“Yeah, no, but not like this— I just wanted someone to spend the night with. Period.”

Kyungsoon chuckled. “I appreciate your honesty.”

“Hey, things would be very different if I hadn’t approached you that night. Honesty is important,” Chanmi commented, swaying her index finger in front of her face a little bit, as if giving a life lesson. “So I gotta ask you… Did you kinda… _Feel_ something? When you looked at me? Something weird?”

Kyungsoon looked straight into Chanmi’s eyes, partly because it was polite to look at her interlocutor while they were talking, but mostly because they drew her in like a mosquito to a flame. There was really something magnetic about Chanmi, and her eyes seemed to be the pools where that energy concentrated. She remembered feeling something weird, yes. She remembered feeling breathless. She remembered dizziness and lightheadedness. She remembered being as entranced by Chanmi’s eyes as she was right then and there, weeks later, sitting on a table at a bar.

She nodded, slowly.

“I did, yes,” Kyungsoon replied. “Normally I don’t stick around strangers when they try to talk to me, but there was something about you that made me want to stick around and figure out what the hell it was.”

Chanmi nodded eagerly at that.

“Yeah, something similar happened to me! I mean, I don’t care about strangers, normally, but you— I swear, I wouldn’t have been able to leave the club without talking to you after I first saw you,” Chanmi admitted. It was strange to be talking about such deep things over beer and in a way that seemed most casual, but honestly, Kyungsoon liked that. 

However, she was still curious about Chanmi— about who she was. About what she did, what she liked, what she didn’t like, what her dreams were, and all those kinds of things. Knowing that they were in the same page, both of them entranced from the get go, was great, but Kyungsoon wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything.

“You complained that we didn’t get to talk much that day,” Kyungsoon commented, and she scooted over on the bench to make more space next to her. She patted the seat next to her, then, all the while she looked at Chanmi. “Come sit here. You’re too far and I can’t hear you properly. I think it’s time you tell me about who the hell you are because so far, all I know is that you like skating and that you’re some sort of mathematical genius who doesn’t fear ink poisoning.”

Chanmi laughed at that. Loud. It was louder than the music playing at the bar, actually, but she didn’t seem embarrassed about being loud.

It made Kyungsoon smile a little in endearment.

“Alright, alright,” Chanmi said before she pushed her bottle over the table and then walked over to sit next to Kyungsoon instead of across from her. The moment she sat down, Kyungsoon felt comforted and relieved by her presence, though at the same time, the taller girl’s presence instigated other kinds of feelings inside of her. “Let’s talk, then. What do you want to know?”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading, i hope you liked it!!  
> find me on Twitter [@jinsempanada](https://twitter.com/jinsempanada) ♡


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